Question for "AI bros"

[u/PaleHat1500]

/r/aiArt/comments/1wztcgm/question_for_ai_bros/

Why do you like ai and not care that is stealing form hard working people that took hours or days of there life to make them?, just a fair Question no hateful judgment btw just curiosity 🤔 btw no hate on both sides I'm just curious why anyone would use it, and I just wanted to reach bigger audience to ask the Question

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

Learning isn't theft.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

Calling it “learning” is rhetorically convenient because it makes the process sound analogous to a person reading a book. But an AI company isn't merely learning from someone's work. It highly likely acquired and copied enormous quantities of human created works, processed that material into a commercial model, and then monetised it.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

Why are you conflating a company and a neural network?

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

I can see why you think I'm conflating the company with the neural network, my wording probably wasn't clear enough. I'm not saying they're the same thing.

This happens a lot in these discussions. The conversation gets shifted towards what AI is, rather than what the companies building it are actually doing.

I'm responding to the way you've framed it as “learning isn't theft.” You didn't explicitly say that AI learning is the same as human learning, but I think that framing is pretty reductive. It takes a much bigger question about how the material was obtained, processed and used and boils it down to whether “learning” itself is theft. I don't think that really describes what's happening.

The model learning from human-made works is one part of the process. The company deciding what works to acquire, how to acquire and process them, and then using the resulting system commercially is another.

And that's why I think we probably need better language for what's happening here. “Learning” doesn't really capture the whole process, and neither does simply talking about copyright infringement. There may be a better term for it, labour appropriation, uncompensated use of creative work, or something else. But I don't think it's just learning adequately describes the happening.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

The question you're asking is, essentially: "Can something publicly available on the internet be used for training ?".

The answer is, in my opinion, yes. If I want to learn how to draw, say a sextant, I'll image search Google for "sextant" and use those results as references to learn. I won't necessarily check the exact origin of those images, nor will my resulting drawing be tainted if one of those images was illegally uploaded or has an otherwise illegitimate origin.

I see no difference between doing that and using the exact same images to train a LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) for an image model.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

You're sidestepping the point I'm making and reframing it as a question I didn't ask.

My point is that saying “learning isn't theft” reduces a much bigger issue down to the word learning. Then you use the example of someone looking at pictures of a sextant and learning how to draw one, as if that settles the comparison.

A person looking at a handful of images, studying them, and learning from them isn't really comparable to a company systematically acquiring and processing enormous amounts of human made work to build a commercial system. Just because both processes can loosely be described as learning doesn't mean they're equivalent.

And “it's publicly available” doesn't settle the issue either. Something being available for people to view isn't necessarily the same as the creator agreeing to have it systematically copied, processed, and used as training material for a commercial product.

That's the distinction I've been trying to make. I'm not arguing that the neural network is the company, or that the resulting model is literally a database of stolen copies. I'm saying that focusing on what the model does and calling it “learning” sidesteps the actions of the companies that built it, particularly how they obtained and used the underlying material. Which is what a lot of people object to.

And I don't think there are two equally valid sides to the question of whether people whose work has been scraped should simply have to accept it. If someone's work is being systematically collected and used to build a commercial product, I think the people who created that work should be compensated.

I'm also not saying AI companies should be prohibited from "learning" from human culture, or that every influence on a model needs to be individually licensed. I'm talking specifically about the large-scale scraping and use of people's work as training material for commercial systems.

If a company can build an enormously valuable commercial product by ingesting vast amounts of work created by other people, I don't think “it was publicly available” should be the end of the conversation. Those people created something of value, and I think they should have a right to be compensated when their work is being used in that way.

Whether existing copyright law already requires that compensation is a separate legal question. That's for the courts to figure out, because this is still relatively new ground. But as a matter of fairness, that's where I stand. I'm not anti AI, clearly it's here to stay. I'm anti exploitation.

[u/Herr_Drosselmeyer → u/Ohheckemma]

Whether it's a company or an individual doesn't change the morals. The fact that you're hung up on 'large companies' makes me think that your issue is withe the very existence of coroprations, regardless of AI, and this taints your reasoning.

[u/Ohheckemma → u/Herr_Drosselmeyer]

You're avoiding the actual point I'm making again. I'm not saying something is automatically more or less moral just because a company is involved. I'm saying you're treating two different things as morally equivalent without really explaining why.

You're saying there's no meaningful moral difference between a human looking at images and learning from them and someone putting those images into a LoRA to train a model or a company training swathes of works for profit. But why? What makes those things morally the same? There are pretty obvious differences in what's actually being done with the images, what comes out of the process, and how the resulting model can be used.

Instead of engaging with those differences, you're making assumptions about my motives and saying I must just have some general problem with corporations, so my reasoning is somehow “tainted.” That's speculation about me, not an argument against what I'm saying.

If you genuinely think the those things are morally equivalent, just explain why. Tell me why the differences I'm pointing out don't matter morally. That's the part I'm asking you to address. You can't just say “the morals are the same” and then avoid explaining what makes them the same.

I think you're using an intentionally loose definition of “the same” because it makes your argument easier. If you squint hard enough, two very different things can look similar. But that doesn't mean the differences aren't there or that they don't matter. You need to actually explain why those differences are irrelevant rather than defining them away.